The neural mechanisms for the visual recognition of objects extend beyond striate cortex into multiple extrastriate cortical areas within the occipital, temporal, and parietal lobes. To understand the neural mechanisms of perception and memory in these areas, we are studying 1)\passive sensory coding by single neurons in the immobilized monkey 2)\dynamic aspects of coding by neurons in an awake monkey engaged in a task requiring selective attention and memory and 3) the functional architecture of the cortex utilizing local metabolic mapping techniques. In the anatomical pathway that mediates spatial perception, we have found that neurons in one area, MT, are arranged in direction-of-motion columns, similar to the orientation columns discovered in the primary visual cortex. In the anatomical pathway that mediate object recognition and memory, we have found that neurons in area V4 code many local features of objects, such as the length and width of contours, textures, and colors. Since neurons in this area are sensitive to form and color differences between a stimulus and its background, they may play a role in separating figure from ground. One of the primary functions of the corpus callosum in area V4 appears to be to integrate the figure/ground mechanism across both halves of the visual field. Neurons at the next stage of processing, inferior temporal cortex, are sensitive to the global properties of objects, such as their shape. In both area V4 and the inferior temporal cortex, we have found that selective attention gates visual processing by filtering unwanted information from the receptive fields. By contrast, selective attention has no effect on neurons in the primary visual cortex or in V2. Based on these results, we propose a two-stage model of perception. At the first stage, figures are extracted from their background by a mechanism that works in parallel over the retina and is preattentive. At the second stage, the relevant figure is selected to be remembered or acted upon by a mechanism that works serially over the retina and is attentive.